Prior Bad Acts

by Tami Hoag

  She twisted onto her side and tried to drag herself out of his reach, tried once more to pull a knee up under herself.

  Karl reached out and grabbed her by the hair, but the hair came off in his hand, a wig. He chucked it aside and straddled her waist.

  She was on her back now. His hands were around her throat, squeezing. She hit at him with her fists, tried to arch her body up beneath him to get him off. She tried to scream. The scream died under his thumbs.

  Karl squeezed harder. Christine Neal was beginning to turn blue from lack of oxygen. Her tongue came out of her mouth, swollen and purple. Her eyes were bulging.

  Karl fixed on her eyes, on the emotion in them. Sheer animal terror. He thought it must be horrible to die this way, looking into the face of your killer and finding no compassion, no sympathy. In his case, he imagined she didn’t see anything at all.

  This wasn’t personal. He had no anger toward this woman, no real desire to kill her. But he couldn’t have her calling the police. He was flying below the radar now. No one had any idea where he was. He was free to move about the city as he wanted. And he had plans. He couldn’t let Christine Neal have an opportunity to ruin those plans. It simply wasn’t practical to let her live.

  The swinging of her arms became weaker and weaker, until she was doing nothing but slapping her hands against the floor… then just twitching… then nothing.

  Karl did not take his hands away from her throat, didn’t stop choking her. He didn’t want Christine Neal reviving and having a second chance to get away or call for help. He kept squeezing until his hands began to cramp.

  When he finally did let go, Karl remained sitting on top of her. Her head fell to one side, mouth hanging open, nothing in her eyes but tiny pinpoint hemorrhages. Christine Neal was gone.

  Karl sighed. He rested for a moment, stretched his hands and fingers, rubbed at the aching muscles of his forearms. After a while he got up and dragged her body down the hall and into the bedroom. He removed her clothes and threw them down the laundry chute where he had thrown the ragman’s clothes, then went back into the bedroom and shoved Christine Neal’s body under her bed, careful to adjust the dust ruffle after.

  He wiped down the bathroom with alcohol. Cleaned out the drain traps. Found a bottle of Drano and poured it into both the sink and the tub drains. In the kitchen, he wiped down the telephone handset and placed it back in the cradle. He left no signs of the struggle.

  He found the door to the basement, put a load of laundry in the washing machine-the ragman’s clothes and Christine Neal’s clothes-added detergent and half a bottle of bleach, and started the machine.

  Back on the first floor, Karl picked up Christine Neal’s blond wig and went back into the bedroom, into the walk-in closet, to dress.

  From a drawer of panty hose and knee-high socks, Karl chose a pair of opaque brown tights. He put them on, taking great care not to run them, then tucked his money into the crotch and tucked his privates away as best he could. Then he chose a brown knit calf-length skirt and pulled it on.

  From a drawer of underwear, he chose a bra. But it was too tight around his rib cage, digging into him. How women put up with the discomfort was beyond him.

  Instead, he found a stretchy, tight-fitting T-shirt and fashioned the illusion of small breasts with two pairs of athletic socks, each pair rolled into a ball. The tightness of the T-shirt held them in place. A boxy brown cotton sweater went over the T-shirt.

  Shoes, he expected, might present a problem. But when he started comparing the length of his foot with the length of Christine Neal’s shoes, Karl found that wasn’t the case. He selected a pair of low-heeled brown boots and pulled them on. They fit as well as any shoes he’d had.

  In the bathroom once more, he set about transforming himself. He had once worked as a stagehand in a playhouse in St. Louis and had watched the actors carefully as they applied the layers of color and shading, creating characters on the bland canvas of their own faces.

  He applied foundation, concealed the bruises and shadows, created eyes with brown liner and shadow and dark mascara. With a shade called Dolce Vita, he painted his swollen lower lip and gave himself the appearance of having a fuller upper lip, using a colored pencil.

  When he had finished, Karl stood back and studied his masterpiece in the mirror. He stretched Christine Neal’s blond wig over his bald head.

  Just like that, he had become a woman.

  Karla.

  No one was on the lookout for a blond woman in a brown skirt and sweater.

  His finishing touches were a brown and blue print silk scarf, which he tied around his throat to hide his Adam’s apple and the red marks on his own throat where Snake’s handcuffs had bitten in the night before, and a pair of large-framed brown tortoiseshell sunglasses, the kind President Kennedy’s wife had always been photographed in.

  Karl went back into the bedroom, bent over, lifted the dust ruffle. Christine Neal’s sightless eyes stared at him; her mouth was open, her swollen tongue sticking out at him. She looked like a spare mannequin that had been discarded in the back room of a store, forgotten under other unneeded props and racks.

  “Thank you, Ms. Neal,” Karl said respectfully. “I’m sure you was a real nice lady.”

  He put the dust ruffle back in place and walked out, stopping at the coat closet in the hall to choose a brown poncho. In the kitchen, he picked up Christine Neal’s handbag and car keys before he let himself out the back door.

  The car in her garage was the dark blue Volvo. Nice. Leather seats and all. A car that wouldn’t stand out in this part of town. She had kept it real clean too. It smelled like lemons.

  Karl backed out of the garage and put the garage door down with the remote. With luck no one would come looking to visit Christine Neal over the weekend. But even if someone did, they would simply find her gone. No Christine, no car, no handbag. She was out. Shopping, maybe, or at a movie. If she worked somewhere, she wouldn’t be missed until Monday at the earliest. If she didn’t work, it could be days before someone noticed she wasn’t around.

  Days and days of freedom to use Christine’s car, to do what he wanted, to go where he pleased.

  He turned down the street and headed out on the next leg of his quest: to find the place that would please him most-the home of his champion, Carey Moore.

  22

  “NO USABLE PRINTS on the judge’s handbag. At least half a dozen people touched the car. So far none of those prints have come back with a rap sheet,” Tippen said.

  He paced back and forth at the end of the conference table, tall and thin, with a long caricature of a face, all angles and hollows, craggy brow, bristly salt-and-pepper mustache. He had been a detective with the sheriff’s department for years before making the move to work Homicide with the city cops.

  As a sheriff’s detective, Tippen had first teamed with Kovac and Liska on a multiagency task force to solve the Cremator murders-a killer who had targeted primarily prostitutes, tortured and killed them, then set their bodies on fire in a public park. They had worked well as a team and had become drinking buddies after.

  “Judge Moore gets more than her fair share of hate mail.” Elwood Knutson, another of the Cremator task force. A man roughly the size of a small brown bear, Elwood was their philosopher in a too-small porkpie hat.

  “That’s hard to believe,” Liska said sarcastically.

  Kovac said nothing.

  “Her clerk has it separated by degrees: crazy, crazier, and certifiable.”

  “Threats?” Kovac asked.

  “Veiled and not so veiled. Anything she gets that looks legitimately scary goes to the sheriff’s detectives.” Elwood glanced at Tippen and said, “Really, it’s a wonder she wasn’t killed a long time ago, considering.”

  “Don’t look at me!” Tippen said. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I changed teams.”

  “Then why hasn’t the quality of their work improved?” Liska asked.

  Tippen fired a chocolate-cove
red coffee bean at her. He had recently acquired an addiction to them, despite the fact that he was the last guy in the department in need of caffeine to wire himself up.

  “I had all the letters copied and brought them over,” Elwood went on, tipping a big hand in the direction of the file folders stacked in front of him. “A little bedtime reading, if anyone’s interested.”

  “What about ex-cons?” Kovac asked. “Any bad guys recently released who might think they have a big ax to grind?”

  “I’ve tracked some of the more obvious candidates through their parole officers,” Liska said. “So far I don’t like any of them for the assault. Despite all efforts by the Department of Corrections, it seems several of them have actually reformed, and can be accounted for by their bosses at the time of the judge’s attack.

  “But,” she continued, “I do have a hot prospect in Ethan Pratt, the father of the foster kids who were murdered.”

  Tippen arched a shaggy brow. “He’s been out of the picture since conception, but now he cares so much he assaults a judge?”

  “He’s of a type,” Liska said. “One of those guys who only wants to be around to make the big, dramatic scene.”

  “An asshole,” Kovac declared.

  “Pratt’s done jail time for minor assault. He punched out a guy in a sports bar for being a Dallas Cowboys fan-”

  “That’s a crime?” Elwood asked.

  “-knocked around a girlfriend. Big temper, small brain,” Liska said. “He made the news when Karl Dahl was arrested, giving a loud, obnoxious statement outside the courthouse after the arraignment. Demanded the death penalty. It somehow escaped his notice that we don’t have the death penalty in this state.”

  “I saw that,” Elwood said. “Fu Manchu mustache and a blow-dried mullet.”

  Liska nodded. “The perennial favorite hot look for the white trash set.”

  “You ever have a mullet, Sam?” Elwood asked.

  Kovac scowled at him. “Jesus Christ.”

  “He had the mustache,” Liska said with mischief in her eyes. “I’ve seen the photographs.”

  “It was the eighties,” Kovac defended himself. “Every cop with balls had a Fu Manchu.”

  “Yeah? I don’t think I was born yet.”

  Kovac gave her a look across the table and tried not to laugh. “Don’t make me come over there, Tinker Bell.”

  “What’re you gonna do?” Liska teased. “Beat me with your walker?”

  “You’re just begging for a full day of misogynist PMS jokes.”

  “Ha! You’re the one asking for it, Kojak. As you well know, you are no match for my mouth.”

  “I’m not touching that,” Tippen announced. “It’s too easy.”

  It felt good to open the pressure valve and release some of the job stress, Kovac admitted. They were merciless with each other, and a lot of their humor would be considered shocking, rude, and in very poor taste by normal human beings. But it was how they coped with a job that showed them the worst kind of human cruelty and depravity on a regular basis.

  Lieutenant Dawes cleared her throat loudly, reining them in. “Ethan Pratt…?”

  Liska had the grace to look sheepish. “He’s on probation. But he’s not at his last known, he didn’t show up for work last night, and he didn’t check in with his PO yesterday. And Amber Franken told me he was going off on the judge the last time he visited, ten days ago. She said he called Moore a fucking cunt.”

  “A popular phrase with the mullet faction,” Tippen said.

  “Practically an endearment,” Elwood concurred.

  “You should add that to your repertoire, Elwood,” Liska suggested. “Girls go wild for that kind of talk.”

  “So, he’s not accounted for, he has a temper, he called Judge Moore the same thing her assailant did,” Dawes said. “We need to find this guy and have a sit-down.”

  “It’s out there,” Liska said. “Be on the lookout for an asshole with a mullet.”

  “I’ll put someone on that specifically,” Dawes said. “There has to be someone out there who knows where this guy is.”

  “Even assholes have friends,” Elwood said.

  “Any word on Stan Dempsey?” Kovac asked.

  He knew there was a BOLO out for Dempsey in all agencies in the entire metro area, but no one wanted to talk about it.

  “He’s the one running around armed to the teeth and promising justice,” Kovac said dryly.

  Dawes shook her head. “We have a call in to his daughter in Portland, Oregon, but she hasn’t called back.”

  “Dempsey has a daughter?” Elwood said with disbelief.

  “Dempsey had sex with a woman?” Tippen said. “Stan, we hardly knew ye.”

  “Well, that’s a problem, isn’t it?” Dawes said. “We don’t know him. We can’t find anyone who knows him. We don’t know where he’d go to hide. We don’t know what he does outside the job.”

  “He used to do some fishing,” Kovac said. “And there was a photograph in his house of him and the ex ballroom dancing.”

  Nobody knew what to say to that. They couldn’t have looked more puzzled if Kovac had jumped up on the table and did the tarantella.

  “Check with the county registrar,” Kovac said. “Maybe he’s got a shack on one of the lakes. And we should try to track down the ex, in case Stan’s decided justice begins in the family.”

  “Good idea, Sam,” Dawes said. “I’ll go back further in Dempsey’s file. She must have been listed as a contact at one time. And we’ve got Dempsey’s address book from his house. She might be in there.”

  “If that doesn’t work, find out from Dempsey’s financials who his attorney for the divorce was,” Tippen suggested. “He’ll have the name of the wife’s attorney. It’s roundabout, but it works.”

  Dawes nodded. “We’ve already checked with the DMV to see if he might have another vehicle registered. There’s nothing.”

  “So he’s in his own car,” Tippen said. “Or has to boost something.”

  “He won’t steal a car,” Kovac said. “It’s against the law.”

  Liska gave him a look. “And torturing someone with a meat fork isn’t?”

  “He sees that as justice. An eye for an eye. That’s his job. But he won’t break the law to do it. For one, that would be against his principles, to say nothing of stupid and careless.”

  “What do we need with Dempsey’s shrink when we have Sam?” Liska asked.

  Kovac looked to Dawes. “It’s just common sense.”

  “Who have you got at Judge Moore’s house?” Dawes asked. “Since no one has any idea where Karl Dahl is, the judge will be Dempsey’s obvious first choice.”

  “If he tries to get to the judge, I’ve got a unit on the house and a prowl car staying within a four-block area around the clock.”

  “How’s Judge Moore doing?” Dawes asked.

  Kovac shrugged. “She’s a tough cookie. She’s hanging in.”

  “She’s tough, but her sentences aren’t,” Tippen complained.

  “Give her a break,” Kovac snapped. “Someone beat the shit out of her last night.”

  Eyebrows went up all around the room. Kovac felt his cheeks heat.

  Liska broke the silence. “He’s trying to quit smoking again.”

  As if that would explain any strange behavior on his part.

  “Oh…”

  “Hmm…”

  “Well…”

  No one looked directly at him except for the lieutenant.

  “Nikki tells me you don’t think much of the husband.”

  “He’s an asshole. I’m on my way to check out his alibi as soon as we’re done here.”

  “You don’t think it’ll hold up?”

  “He’s an asshole,” Kovac reiterated. “What’s the word on the videotape from the parking garage?”

  Liska shook her head. “I wouldn’t recognize myself on that tape. See for yourself.”

  She went to the television that was sitting on a cart in the
corner of the room nearest Sam and started the tape rolling.

  Kovac frowned. “This the best they could do?”

  “Considering what they had to work with…”

  The picture had a slightly better clarity, but the subjects were featureless.

  “What’s that white thing on the back of the perp’s jacket?” Kovac asked.

  “Some kind of logo, I suppose,” Liska said, “but there’s no chance in hell of ever being able to read it.”

  “What about the check of the license plates in the ramp?”

  “Nothing so far.”

  “Not the Haas kid or his pal, or Ethan Pratt,” Kovac said, thinking out loud. “Anyone with priors?”

  “Nothing,” Tippen said.

  Kovac sighed, scratched his head, drank some coffee. His eyelids felt like they were lined with sandpaper. He pushed his chair back from the table and got up. “Are we done here?”

  “You have better things to do?” Tippen said sarcastically.

  Kovac stretched and yawned. “Yeah. I thought I’d go catch some bad guys, then maybe catch a movie or save the world or something.”

  Liska batted her eyelashes at him. “A superhero’s work is never done.”

  “You got it, babe,” he said. “Play your cards right, and maybe I’ll let you watch me change clothes in a phone booth.”

  “So what was that about?” Liska asked when they were back in their cubicle in the squad room.

  Kovac didn’t look at her. “What was what?”

  “Last night you wanted to leave Carey Moore for dead. This morning you’re ready to defend her honor? What’s that?”

  “I feel sorry for her,” he said, making a show of putting on his reading glasses to go back over his field notes. “She got the crap beat out of her while her husband is off fucking some bimbo and couldn’t care less what’s going on with his wife.”

  “You know that?”

  “I know when a guy’s lying about it. And she’s trying to pretend it’s not happening or that somehow it doesn’t matter to her. I don’t get that.”